The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next) (16 page)

“I’m sorry to put you through this.” He’d got a towel out of somewhere and had it on his head. “Could you drive me to the hospital?”

“Okay. Sure.” The cop was in the way. The keys were sticky and slimy at the same time and I dropped them twice before I managed to switch on the engine, found the horn and sounded it. The cop turned round. I smiled apologetically for giving him a start. He looked at me frowning. I smiled again, eyes open wide, eyebrows raised artlessly, trustingly. Let us through please, I smiled, we’re innocent travellers, we’ve just come on this unfortunate whatever it is and we need to get through. If you would be so good. Somebody outside my window screamed “Please! Please don’t! No! No!” I raised my right hand respectfully to the cop, gave the suggestion of a wave and hoped my demeanor was right. Respect above all else, respect was what was needed here. He turned and began to walk slowly backwards, waving us towards him like he was on point duty, looking to right and left, saying some things to men with clubs. I moved forward in first gear, car jumping as I struggled to get used to the clutch. Don’t let it cut out, I cried to myself.

“My God, look at that poor girl.”

I mechanically followed Frank’s gazing direction and saw a heavyset woman that looked like Mussolini in drag being beaten with fists and her nose spurting. It was Frances. I looked around for Aisling but she wasn’t there. The cop was staring quizzically at me, beckoning away at me, and I found I wasn’t moving. I raised my hand smiling cringing and drove slowly on.

“Here, stop. Help her into the car.”

“I can’t. If I try and do that we’re finished. They’ll get me and that won’t help any of us.”

He didn’t answer, saw the sense in what I was saying I suppose or maybe decided he was in the hands of a heartless bastard. Suddenly like fog lifting the road was clear in front of us and the cop was no more and I put the boot down and before I knew it we were in Drumahoe. Sleepy Drumahoe with watchers standing sentinel on footpaths waiting. Then Altnagelvin Hospital, trying to remember where the turn to casualty was. I could have cried I was that relieved.

“You’ll be sorted in here I hope. How do you feel?”

“I’m all right. I’ll be all right. It’ll take a lot more than sticks and stones.”

“I’ll wait for you. Just need to find a parking place here.”

“No, I’ll tell you what. Just leave me off at casualty and drive on into the city. I’m not going to impose on you any further, I’ve put you through enough.”

Looking for the turn to casualty. “But what about you? How will you?”

“I’ll find my way to Guildhall Square. That’s where they’re going to assemble. I know Derry. Could we arrange to meet a certain time somewhere and you could tell me then where you’ve parked the car?”

“Okay. Let’s see, what time is it now? Right, how about half three in the City Hotel? You could be ages here waiting.”

“That’s the job. Just drop me here. Is this the entrance to casualty?”

“Aye. But I don’t like leaving you. It doesn’t seem right.”

“I’m safe now Jeremiah. I’m not going to bleed to death.” Smiling warpainted face under the red turban. “Thanks, you’ve been brilliant.”

I drove into Derry, past crowds gathered at Irish Street like for a carnival on a newly-mown grass banking littered with mounds of stones, into a city with traffic starting and stopping in ordinary ways. Brilliant. Is that what I’ve been, is that what I am, the brilliant selfpreserver? Well that’s okay isn’t it, that’s the human impulse.

I found a parking spot near the top of Bridge Street, walked away looking back at number plate, feet crucified, keys stickydry in trousers pocket. Tyrone registration, should be safe, mixed bag of religions up there, bag of cats. What a bloody country. Kings and tribes at each other’s throats long before Westminster, before the Normans, before Christ for Christ sake, the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.

What did you call the guy that brought the Normans here over some woman he was banging? Dermot MacMurrough, that was him. Bring me the head of Dermot MacMurrough. And his balls too when you’re at it. And out at Burntollet protesting Protestants programd to attack any threat to their way of life and more of them at Irish Street also stating their Britishness. Give me love, give me you know what anyday and everything else can go to hell. Where is Aisling? If she gets by Burntollet she’ll only have one more gauntlet left to run. I’m worrying about her now I’m safe, worried about myself when I was scared. But sure that’s the way anybody would feel. She’ll be fine, she knows how to take care of herself. Run Jeremiah, run, she said in Duke Street the day of the fifth and she ran too. I was batoned and none of them touched her.

A girl coiffured to the eyeballs bumped into me turning the corner at the bottom of Bridge Street fumbling in her handbag for something. Nice smell off her. Sorry she said and smiled. Not a patch on Aisling. Protestant eyes too. She’ll be okay. As long as she didn’t see Frances getting punched and go and try and help her. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen, they were well separated, she wouldn’t have got involved. I’ll see her in the City Hotel at four o’clock if not before. How long’s that? Plenty time.

Foyle Street was bad and getting worse the further I got on it. I thought of septicaemia. Maybe I should wash the two of them, wash them and treat them, might even take a bath and all, get the whole hog cleaned. Be set for tonight then. Nuisance, time-consuming, but still be worth it. Taxi! Thanks, thought you weren’t going to stop there. Marlborough Terrace please. Christ, what did I say? Dead giveaway. Fenian written all over it. I appreciate you stopping, good to get sitting down. My feet. No no, I wasn’t marching. It’s these corns, let them go too far. That’s right, Marlborough Terrace. Yeah, I heard that myself. Somebody said there was trouble out past Drumahoe somewhere. Terrible country.

+++++

I kept my two dates at the City Hotel. Aisling was waiting outside for me and I kissed her so long and held her so tight people were looking.

“Oh thank God. You smell lovely Jeremiah. Are you all right?”

Red mouth to her red mouth, washed against her unwashed and the smell of last night still off her.

I took a breath. “I’m fine. What about you? I was so worried.”

“You know me. Survivor. I’ll tell you later. Will we go inside for a bite to eat? Unless you want to stay and listen to the speeches?”

Some girl speaking through a sound system outside the Guildhall was calling Derry the capital city of injustice. Clever that. Bit of an exaggeration but still, speechmaker’s license.

“Naw, we’ll go in, is that okay? I’m starved with the hunger.”

Inside I found Frank Gogarty and gave him his keys. He had a neat professional bandage on him like a white skullcap and was looking not bad considering, feeling reasonable. I did the introductions but they remembered each other anyway. From the Grandstand. Smiling pleasantries, car’s in Bridge Street, do you want me to show you, not at all, I’ll find it, pleasantries again, thanks, handshakes, goodbyes. People that pass in the night.

“That’s a really nice man,” said Aisling.

“Amazing man. You wanted to see the courage of him. He actually owns the civil rights banner that was carried on the march you know.”

“Owned. I saw it being burned.”

“Aw dear. Tell us, how long has Frances to stay in?”

“Two days at least. She’s lucky when I think of it. If I hadn’t seen her and dragged her away it might have been too late you know.”

“Will we ask for a menu? That food smells lovely whatever it is.”

+++++

We heard trouble as we lay together that night. Sometime before we went to sleep it died away. In the morning we listened to the Radio Éireann news about the police invading the Bogside at half two in the morning singing Hey hey we’re the Monkees and beating people up. A man came on saying he rang the police to tell them the RUC were in the street outside kicking in doors and breaking windows and could they send someone.

But all this was months ago. There’s another kind of chassis now because the prime minister Captain Terence O’Neill had to resign for being too moderate and another branch of the aristocracy has taken over don’t you know, chap I hardly heard of before called James Dawson Chichester-Clark. Aisling reckons he’s going to go at it with both barrels. The place will be like Dawson City, she says, before this cowboy’s finished. She showed me an interview Terence O’Neill gave the Belfast Telegraph after he resigned. I can nearly rhyme it off it’s that good.
It’s frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbors with cars and television sets. They will refuse to have eighteen children on National Assistance. If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness they will live like Protestants in spite of the authoritative nature of their Church.

Ah, our Church. He got that right anyway. The authority of the Church that has us bending the knee handed down by boys like Augustine who for the best years of his life got up on everything that moved and rumor had it some things that didn’t and then turned to God for something that would do him for when he was past it. Father of the Church now, biggest slagger off of women ever born after having spent half his life shagging them shitless, declared marriage a necessary evil, evil because it involved a dirty three letter word ending in X, necessary because how else were the numbers in the Church going to get any bigger? God’s ways are not our ways and all that, but what can you do? And who’s this else there was? Of course, their royal highnesses Solomon and David, who when they weren’t writing psalms and stuff for the bible were having it off with whatever took their fancy. Lecturing to the chosen people and lechering with whomsoever they chose.

And now that I’m on a roll there’s Paul the Sixth in his marble halls in the Vatican popetificating to women that are dying in childbirth and of course our bishop Doctor Farren in his palace across the street from Mickey MacTamm’s barbers with its twenty-five rooms, the palace I’m talking about here, Mickey only has the one if you don’t count the toilet, honoring us with his presence on Corpus Christi and Easter Sunday and the like as he lords it down the middle aisle soaking all and sundry with holy water. And the priests. Hourigan. Swindells. Cullinan. Finucane. My God, how many bad apples does it take to make a barrel rotten? Or is it the barrel that makes the apples bad?

And yet. And yet they have me in their thrall still, they seduce me with their sights and sounds and smells, to this day I’m a sucker for their incense and their rituals and their Gregorian chants, they frighten me half to death with their pictures of hell.

The truth is, reader, I’ve been hearing about hell since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I can’t get it out of my head, that place Our Lady showed little Lucia and the other Fatima children in a vision with its burning blackened demons that used to be people walking about like you and me.

But then I say to myself, how can this be, who told us about this? Lucia, that’s who, ten years old, poor indoctrinated child, hearing about hell since she was knee high to a grasshopper, imagination going like wildfire, grew up and became a nun and wrote her memoirs that faithfully told of hell again but now in more measured language. It’s like my brain breaks free for a while and tells me the Church is giving me crap but my soul is triggered to shrivel up at certain times when they go on about eternal punishment and it’s always for sins of the flesh I can’t help noticing and not financial corruption like you might get in the Vatican bank for example. They’ve had me twenty-eight years now and it doesn’t look like they’re letting go easy.

But I started to turn the corner a bit round about the middle of February there, Valentine’s Day in fact. Talk about appropriate. This Spanish priest Father Morales, or Father Juan Francisco Morales to give him his full name, came to the cathedral on some sort of exchange scheme and he was a godsend, a man sent from God whose name was Juan you could say.

I only went to him in confession because I was stuck seeing Father Finucane was away taking his place in Barcelona. Anyway, the first time I went I told him about sleeping with Aisling, holding my breath like to see how he’d take it, testing the holy water as it were. It turned out he’d the most amazing attitude, so much so I nearly peed my trousers with joy right there in the confession box. You love her? he asked. Yes, oh yes Father, but she won’t marry me, she doesn’t believe in marriage, she says it’s manmade. Then stay with her, he said, and convert her if you can. Pray, pray for her and you will see, God will reward you. But is it all right to go on making love to her, Father? Oh yes, absolutely, this is very important. Always remember that love is the greatest of all things, like the rainbow that God sent after the flood it overarches all other things.

This man could be mad, I thought, but he could also be exactly what I want. He’s a priest isn’t he? He’s my confessor isn’t he? So then the next time I went I told him about the bondage, breaking it to him in stages if you follow me, and later the three in the bed thing,
but that’s only two days out of every seven, Father, and I have to do it to hold onto her.
I couldn’t see him right in the dark of the confession box but I’d a feeling he wasn’t batting an eye.

The fact that he went away with John Pius Allbright at the end of May, to Las Vegas I heard though nobody has ever actually confirmed that, I heard other people saying the Canaries, in no way affects what he told me. If what he said was true for those three and a half months then it’s still true. Just because he turned out to have certain tendencies doesn’t make what he said invalid, right? He didn’t deceive anybody, he never pretended to be heterosexual, not like John Pius did. Married and all too, death on homos Michael Cole was telling me,
queer sort of a queer hater
he said, never out of the parochial house, lived in the priests’ pockets, prize prick in other words. Allbright he fell, proud carrier of the canopy over His Lordship Bishop Neil Farren’s head up and down the middle aisle every Corpus Christi and Holy Thursday and so on and so on. Shows you, doesn’t it? I still don’t know what Father Juan saw in him but there you go.